Talk about not getting it. A Santa Monica coffee shop owner strikes gold by having a Breeze bikeshare station placed directly in front of her business, and freaks out over the loss of one or two parking spaces. If people aren’t using the bike racks next to her business, despite the city’s boom in bicycling, that should tell her something. But probably won’t. Thanks to David Huntsman for the heads-up.

A Spokane city councilman claims it costs $63,500 to paint one mile of bike lanes; he’s right, as long as you include all engineering costs and expenses to repaint the entire roadway after repaving. In other words, it’s impossible to break out the relatively minor cost of bike lanes from roadwork that would have been done anyway.

This is the cost of traffic violence. A Boston researcher killed while riding her bike this past August was part of a team that just announced a major breakthrough in using stem cells to grow a new thyroid.

A 19-year old Brit career criminal stole a car, blocked the path of a bike rider, then get out and attacked him before intentionally ramming two taxis as he made his getaway; he got three years for his efforts.

Thanks, Ted. I just read the story. The sstore owner seems pretty clueless about how much business bikeshare will bring to her business. Maybe someone should send her some links to Elly Blue’s work on bikenomics.

The bike boulevard pictured was like several roads we were on in Holland, not including the red. Small roads between villages had two bike lanes with one car center lane. Bikes have right of way in the lanes. Drivers would pass in the center lane. If 2 drivers were approaching and cyclists were in the lanes they had to negotiate how they would pass while bikes stayed in their lanes. Those roads were 50 K (31 mph). So you could easily have a car behind you for a short period of time. Of course the Dutch drivers are slightly more polite than the average US driver.